SPR: Seeking comfort
by TheDrowned
Summary: A collection of stories about the members of SPR and things that maybe you wouldn't see ordinarily. What do the members of Shibuya Psychic Research find comforting? (Title changed from The Dark Side of the Moon 11/21)
1. Rain

/ Hi there! I've always wanted to do a collection of bits-and-pieces stories. Some of these will have more plot than others. Thank you for reading. Please take time to leave a review. Thanks! /

Rain

Mai would often use public transportation to get to her job at SPR. She knew that the majority of the members of the group had cars, and she was fairly certain that Masako Hara had a personal chauffeur. However, there was no way that she herself would have a car of her own any time soon, what with being an orphan and still in school at that. No, Mai Taniyama would not take a car.

She didn't mind the public transit systems at all. In fact, she felt a quiet tranquility in riding them most of the time. However, there were certain specific situations in which she took to avoiding the system and walked instead. The first was during rush hour because those places could get uncomfortably crowded amazingly fast. Another was when she was sick. She knew she was making it harder on herself by walking to wherever she was going, but she took a sort of 'martyr's pride' in knowing that she was protecting those around her from the fate she was suffering. It made her feel just a little bit heroic. Mai Taniyama: Defender of the Innocents, both alive and dead. She knew she was romanticizing, but it still made her giggle to herself as she walked anyway.

The third situation which would lead Mai to walking was rain. She knew it was absurd, and it was one of the things that she would tell her close friends about which would cause them to shriek and giggle. "Mai, you'll freeze to death!" they would say to her in the winter. "Then your colleagues will have to hunt you down and exorcise you!" They would all be giggling at this point, Mai especially, at the thought of SPR trying to stop her as a ghost. She knew all of their tricks, she could definitely put up a fight!

And sometimes it _was_ very cold. Sometimes, she'd come into work and her fingers would be numb as she would hang her coat up, and still numb as she would pull files out for Naru or Lin. Sometimes it took until she had made Naru his tea for them to thaw. But it was worth it. She loved the rain, even in the winter. It was amazing to her how the water cycle worked, the way it took what had fallen and brought it up high in elegant formation as clouds, and then dropped it again as rain. It reminded her of life and death and the work that she did. Yet, even before she had come to work for SPR, and long before she had seen her first ghost, she had loved the rain. There was something about the smell of the air when rain fell, or the refreshing feeling of it hitting her skin. Maybe it was the memory she held dear of her mom running around with her, jumping like idiots in a summer rain, slipping in the mud of the park, splashing about, soaking wet and full of joy.

Mai loved the rain, even when it froze her, or drove like needles into her skin with a bitter wind. She loved it even when she was already sick and cold and her friends were telling her to come inside already. She loved seeing it land on the windows of the van while on the way to a case. She would trace her fingers with the droplets and Naru would look at her and roll his eyes. She knew it was childish, but Mai loved the rain.


	2. In A Crisis

The Dark Side of the Moon: 02 In A Crisis

/Sometimes I feel like there's just not enough John Brown fic in the world. So I wrote one! It's not my best work but I really wanted to put something out there for John! Enjoy! (and review) /

If there is one person on this team whose confidence never seems to waver, that was Naru. However, if there is one person that they would want in a crisis, that would be John Brown. He isn't the largest presence among the core SPR group, no that is definitely Naru, or even Takigawa sometimes. Nor has he the most powerful skills at dispelling evil spirits, although that isn't to say that John is weak. His Catholic exorcisms are powerful and among the best in the country, however, he does happen to keep company with some of the best spiritualists around.

What John has that sets him apart is a seemingly endless well of comforting energy. When the young priest arrives at a case, everyone relaxes even just slightly. There is something about how he manages to keep calm, even in the most dire of situations. Others may lose their cool, but John, even terrified out of his mind somehow appears to always keep calm. Mai swears she's never seen him angry, which she can't say for anyone else in their group. "He may actually be a saint." Monk had said on more than one occasion.

There was one case in particular where John had been targeted above all of the others, specifically because he was a foreigner. Naru had been able to fool the spirit with his Japanese heritage, and Lin had never gone too far from the base, which was well protected by Ayako's paper protection charms. However, John had stuck out like a sore thumb.

By the second day, John had been pushed down stairs, had narrowly dodged six knives that had flown by him in the hallway, and confessed that he had a constant feeling of someone watching him. By noon the second day, he had gone missing.

Monk was livid at how John had just vanished, right before him. The two had been making some rounds, checking out a room with a slight drop in temperature, when John had simply disappeared. Mai was worried, as she hadn't received any relevant dreams and Masako was very upset, recalling how the same had happened to her on the Urado case. Naru, Lin and Yasuhara were working as fast as they could trying to uncover any history behind the house that would help their case, but they were coming up with nothing. Ayako busied herself creating more protection charms, but they all knew that the one they needed to protect was already gone.

Then suddenly, John's image appeared on one of the cameras, specifically the one taping the room that he had disappeared in. He stood, back to the wall, facing what appeared to be a dark cloud, a shadowy and evil-seeming entity. Takigawa sprinted to the door, but nothing he could do would open it. On the camera, John stood calmly as the spirit hurled obscenities at him, cursing him and everyone who dared enter the country. He insulted his character, his powers, his faith, and through it all John remained calm. That isn't to say that John was not scared shitless. He was absolutely terrified, however he is better than even Lin and Naru at repressing his emotions in favor of rational thought when he needs it most.

When the words flying at John did not appear to hurting him, the spirit began with furniture instead. The group at the base watched this all unfold on the screens, unable to do a thing to help. As John's dodging grew slower, and he began to get hit increasingly more, he still did not cry out in anger or fear. He seemed to be calculating both his and the spirit's timing. Then, somehow, in the midst of this bludgeoning, he was able to manage a small rite, not enough to exorcise the spirit completely, but enough to silence him and weaken his barriers on the doors. John collapsed on the floor, just after the Monk managed to break the door down.

The next night, Mai did have a relevant dream, and it turned out the spirit was that of a mentally unstable squatter who had lived there while the house was in disrepair many years ago. With that information, the team was able to successfully cleanse the spirit, as John recovered. He was surprised, and maybe even slightly embarrassed when everyone praised him on his ability to handle the situation, when he was so isolated. He brushed off their compliments and smiled despite the huge bruises covering his face. "No big deal," he had said, as if he had been kidnapped by angry and violent spirits a hundred times before. And smiling in his bed, John's comforting energy made everyone else feel just a little bit better about the whole ordeal.


	3. Keeping Time

03 Keeping Time

/I got a request for a more Naru-centric story, so here ya go!/

Naru hated how aware he was of the passage of time. Something within him, probably due to the nature of his powerful psychic energy, was able to keep time almost exactly, even if he hadn't seen a clock in days or weeks. He could glance up at a clock every few days, adjust for about a minute or two, and then carry on. This was his least favorite part of his abilities.

He knew it was likely tied to how the energy moved within him at a constant rate, just below the perception of his senses. However, he could sense it as a whole, and something about the constant-ness of the whole motion helped him to keep track of the constant passage of time.

Naru was no fool, of course. He'd taken advanced physics classes during his studies of the paranormal back in England. He knew that time was in fact, not a constant; it slowed when the object perceiving it increased in speed. He knew that if he were to go at almost the speed of light, what felt like a month to him could be years for those not traveling at his speed. And he knew that at the speed of light, time essentially stopped. But, realistically, however, he would never go close to the speed of light and he would shake his head at himself at how he had even considered that as a possible situation. Time travel was something Gene thought about, not Naru, who thought to himself that he was definitely the more rational of the two.

That was another thing he found displeasing, every moment of his life, he knew exactly how long it had been since he had seen Gene's death in a vision. His thoughts would flash back to Gene when he realized how much time had passed. It had been years now, he thought, and he wondered about what that meant, especially given how Gene still lingered in the dreams of his younger assistant. When would his brother finally give it up and move on? The possibility of Gene's pleasant persona warping into that of a spirit who had overstayed their time among the living darkened the cloud already looming over his office. He hated knowing how much time had passed.

Mai was the opposite. She never seemed to know what time it was, arriving late to work with the excuse of "Sorry, Naru I lost track of time!" The concept had seemed so unfathomable to him that he had snapped at her the first few times she had come in late, even if it was only about a minute or so. However, he had eventually grown used to her impossible ability to be clueless about the time. It was relaxing in its own sort of way, like many other aspects about her. The tea that she made was one of those things: very relaxing, and now as he felt the dark miasma filling in the room, a consequence of brooding so long, he called out to her to make him a cup of tea. She burst in a few minutes later, all smiles and "Here ya go Boss!" A beam of light for his darkened mood, innocent and oblivious to how time was constantly moving ahead.

But it was enough to remind him that he was working on some important research at the moment, research which could prove useful for the case that they would begin in a week. People thought of him as a workaholic, but in reality, he was simply doing his best to keep his focus off of the clocks of the world. He didn't keep any in his office, or wear a watch for that matter. When he needed to know the time, he only had to reach within his own energy to know. And when he was working, he could get so wrapped up in his own progress that he would lose track of time. "He's in the Naru-Zone!" Mai would chirp, when the others would arrive and ask where he was. They would smirk at that, and maybe he would ignore them and continue, satisfied in a way that he couldn't really express. Or maybe he would emerge to remind them that this wasn't a cafe they were running here, thank-you-very-much. Either way, the presence of his work in his life allowed for him to focus on more important things than time. And Naru liked that.


End file.
